Readers' comments

There must be some mode to suggest the government to bring in several reforms in order to engage industries in increasing their benchmark wages so as to get the advantage of our country being easily accessed by employers as it would later reflect on PCI(percapita-income) as a whole.

I wonder if the Tea Party is still demanding that there should not have been any bailout for the Banks and Auto Industries. If so, I hope they aren’t applying for jobs in those sectors.
Oh, yea they want SMALLER government, but they want the government to institute family values, put pray back in the schools.
Um, does that sound like smaller government to you?

Although china's employment prospect isn't so goood,it will be better.In china,university education is so popularized,the outcome of which is that more and more people with high education will serve the society.

We can see, India, Brazil is emerging developed economies, so it's understandable.
Greece, Spain you all know that their problem: public debt crisis.
Japan, there have stable economic development thank to instant effective policies

Though not listed, I bet Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland are doing alright....Germany is already listed and going strong. All the countries atop this list are not the one's I would want to live in and I doubt you'd want to live in them either....though deregulation is the recommendation offered by many, it offers a false sense of security when your economy is only just emerging from decades or centuries of stagnation (India, Russia, China, Brasil, etc.) Once you have emerged however, growth must be controlled to some extent to even out the extent to which wealth is allocated within....this has been the success of many European countries as well as Australia and Canada.....though Milton Friedman was a brilliant man, he was not right about everything and many of todays brightest economist including nobel laureates such as Krugman and Stiglitz seem to subscribe to the Canadian/Scandinavian model.

Time for a little load balancing. Since India does not take foreign workers, maybe all the Indians currently working in the US can now go back to India, help reduce the unemployment in the US. Thank you and goodbye.

There are tons of foreign workers in India. I've seen them. They're Americans who were told by their multi-national employers, "You can move to India and accept Indian wages, or find another job."

You think that getting rid of underpaid H1-Bs in this country will leave behind highly-paid jobs? Think again. If you want one of their jobs, beg Intel, Cisco, Google, Oracle, Microsoft,... to send you there.

I am all for opening labour markets in both directions, but is your assertion America would have a hard time replacing them because its slim picking at Cal Tech, MIT, Princeton, Berkley, or Stanford these days?

America would have a hard time replacing people within those fields because very few Americans want to major in them. More than half of all engineering doctorate students, for instance, are foreign born. About a third of all doctorate degrees in science and engineering are awarded to immigrants. Do you honestly believe that cutting these jobs would at all benefit the economy? And the scientists and engineers that are foreign born also make greater incomes than natives, so it's not as though we're just trying to get "cheap labor"; it means we're getting more qualified labor. Try cutting that away from your Intels and your Apples—the most you'll do is hinder the growth of technologies in the US.

We have millions of expats from the west and citizens of Nepal and Bangladesh working in India. I've never in my 10 years of professional life heard one Indian ever care, much less complain.

The visa red tape is comparable to that in the US, but its taken care of by the Indian company who is sponsoring you. The issue at hand is - do you want to work here ?

The downside is that you won't make a US salary. Your salary will be roughly comparable to what you would make in the US if you take cost of living into account, but not by a long long shot if you compare on a USD basis.

It is a developing country. There is pollution and civic services/government in general don't work as well as in the US. But if you would want to work in India, totally go for it.

We are a very poor country and don't rank very well anywhere. You don't have to be happy India ranked first in something. But if you have any decency at all at least don't flame us for it.

You are welcome if you want to work here.
But just for your info : Living conditions of a VP in fortune 500 firm here is comparable to living conditions of Bank Clerk in US, also there are many more things which you won't be able to enjoy (for e.g. sex without marrige, american nightlife etc).

Foriegn workers are most welcome here, and in fact, are treated very well here (applies to fair skinned ones only, not to other types).

Believe me, you are much more fortunate to be there, even if you are unelmployed.

What I honestly believe was fairly clearly defined by "I'm all for opening labour markets both ways." and referenced the top 5 engineering universities in the world, all of them in the US of A.

I suppose a good deal of the native born engineers end up working on military projects which foreign born can not qualify for due to security clearance requirements, which might play a factor on the pool of labour for the private non military sectors.

How many engineers, in total, graduate from these schools? A couple thousand? And, how many of those engineer are here on student visas?

A school I have a relationship with (none of the above) graduates almost 1000 engineers per year, with a 95% placement within 6 mo of graduation. The problem they have is filling the student openings, especially in grad school.

First, Edward, your list is not consistent with some that are published. And, it would be highly variable depending on the the profession that the employer was seeking. The most sought-after graduates today are petroleum engineers. You would have an amost completely different list for that profession. Computer science would have another list.

Second, most major employers of engineering talent hire from 25-30 national schools plus many local schools, not five. And they focus their hiring on those major schools with the largest graduating classes, figuring they will be better able to find top talent in a large population than a small one. Schools such as Penn State, Illinois, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Purdue all end up high on the priority list.

You may be right about the distribution of jobs, but the real issue is the total availability of talent.

Those were just some of the vast list of pool for engineering schools in the USA.. there are many others and they I'm sure from one end of the university spectrum to the other provide more than enough quality to do the work required.

Cherry picking from the 'best' is the various industries inclination that somehow the less 'premium' schools are leaving out key information from the course work. Making the attendees less informed or qualified in their area of study.

Smart people will shine no matter education they might after have after their name.

I agree, Edward. It is the students who make the school. That is why companies tend to recruit where the best students go.

The problem remains, however, that our schools depend on foreign students to fill the rolls, and especially in grad school. Those are the engineers that are hired. Companies prefer not to go through the bureaucratic hassle required to obtain an H-1B visa, but they need the people.

If the Indians leave, the US economy will shrink and you will be worse off. (If you were to say, not by much, well, then, not by much would them leaving reduce unemployment in the US). "Last to arrive, most to blame", is the ironic saying.

Do not worry about us. Jobs in Brazil are not driven by the commodities sector (although our trade balance certainly has a lot to do with commodities, almost 50% I believe). The labour market here has to do mostly with the domestic market, with services and industry taking the lead. Oh, about the quality of the work, which seems to worry you so much, it is improving a lot. That is one of the reasons why our educational system, which still has many flaws, has not been able to cope with the needs of more skilled jobs that are being offered, in growing numbers. Like many developing countries, the problems are there for everyone to see, but I can tell you that there is a sense that things are improving and the benefits can be felt by the population.

Given the nature of the survey, I'd say that most of the jobs in question are in the manufacturing and services sectors, primarily focused on the domestic market. The number of commodities companies is relatively small and I presume they are not overrepresented in the survey.

Going beyond the survey, both the services and the manufacturing sectors are far more important than commodities in terms of employment, even though the importance of the latter with respect of capital investment and trade balance might suggest otherwise.

The article states that new jobs are being created mainly in the services sector. That is visibly true. I must also point out that the country has been receiving a considerable number of skilled workers coming mainly from crisis-striken european countries, such as Spain, which is an evidence of the quality of the jobs since anyone would think very carefully before trading living in their own country for bad working conditions in a developing country.

Finally, if I am not mistaken in my analysis, most of the commodities sector (such as soybean, for instance) is not labor-intensive so comparatively few jobs are being created in those sectors even though they are booming due to high international prices.

Well, if you consider that the primary sector of the economy accounts for less than 20% of the Brazilian workforce, and that almost 60% of all jobs are in the tertiary (services and trade) sector, then the relationship between commodities and the labor market is mostly only indirect, because a sudden drop in the price of commodities would harm all the economy and, thus, the internal trade and services market, which drives the Brazilian economy. As for the quality of work, according to what I know they encompass all kinds of work and seem to be lacking especially in the extremes of qualification: there are too many offers for highly skilled jobs (even more than the current Brazilian economy seems to have available) and also too many offers for cheap and unskilled jobs.

Not sure why there is so much employer seeking to hire as the GDP growth is not going to be so good and neither inflation. Maybe it is because administrative burden (tax, imports (50%local) other), bad managers seeking to hire more than what they need, labor inefficiencies.

I could say that inflation has out-weighed the economic benefits, not to say there has not been improvement in employment and inflation. An apartment in Curitiba is now R$150-200,000, in Aracaju- R$90,000, not to mention Rio and SP. The media, and many optimists, are promoting Brazil as a success. I hesitate based on the reality I see every day, the taxes I pay, the crime I have been victim of, and notorious logistics I have faced. I volunteer in my community, and I see the inequities.

Quoting from the country report regarding Italy: "Once seasonal variations are removed from the data, Italy’s Net Employment Outlook stands at -2%, although hiring prospects strengthen by 5 percentage points quarter-over-quarter and remain relatively stable compared to the same period of 2011."
Such hiring prospects may appear remarkable, given Mr Monti's cure and the prevailing forecast of a 2% GDP fall in 2012, as opposed to a small increase in 2011. Yet this is what job protection is all about. No short-run link from production to employment. In practical terms, since they are legally forced to hoard labour, most firms foresee that the expected lower production will lead to lower productivity rather than employment, thus producing more red ink for them. With the obvious longer-run results on their ability to grow. The apparent conclusion is that the numbers of your chart mean different things for different countries.

This chart isn't useful enough because of varying growth rates of the available workforce in each country. India with a population growth rate of 1.5% may not really be better off than Japan (with a declining population) if the hiring isn't aggressive enough to absorb excess labor.

That's quite insightful. However you will have to understand that the employment outlook has a purpose other than showing which country is better off.
The employment outlook tries to project employer's perspective in a specific country and may be taken as a guide for understanding their mood.It can also be correlated with a strong or weak order pipe line the employer see's in near future for itself.